On the day after Hillary Clinton went on "60 Minutes" to hide the lies of her husband — 21 years ago — I rode knee-to-knee with her in a small plane and listened to her rehearse her war strategy: "Pound the Republican attack machine and blame the press."

The events of the past week have confirmed a nagging fear: Those of us who'd hoped the controlling, deceptive, defensive Clinton of years past had grown into a more mature kind of leader are wrong.

Advertisement

She has reacted to a series of legitimate press reports raising serious questions about her use of a private email server to conduct the public's business while secretary of state by going into bunker stance and attacking the messengers. We have seen this face on Hillary too often before, and it is deeply unappealing.

If Clinton wants to rebuild trust with voters and win the White House, she needs to sideline her arrogant instincts. She must show humility. It's time she speaks candidly about her mistakes and what she has learned from them.

None of this is going to happen unless someone makes it happen.

That someone won't be her husband or a reporter. It can only be a credible Democratic challenger for the presidency who can create clear contrasts and finally explode the myth that attacking Hillary is always an act of partisan warfare.

The obvious challenger, the one with a real opportunity to sharpen Hillary's candidacy if not derail it entirely, is Elizabeth Warren.

What we learned this week, via the New York Times and Associated Press, is that Clinton deliberately set up a private email system to use for all of public business she conducted as the nation's chief foreign policy officer. She did so despite explicit rules prohibiting that behavior.

And with each passing day, suspicions of her motives grow darker. Technology experts now say her private e-mail system gave her the ability to delete messages. It opened her communications to hackers that State warned were a threat.

Most shocking is the fact that her secretive email address seems to have enabled Clinton and the State Department to evade Freedom of Information Law requests from journalists. This law is one of the triumphs of liberalism, meant to protect the public's right to know when a government official refuses to give up information. Because she used a private address, such requests by The AP to the State Department came up empty for a year. The organization is now deliberating whether to sue.

Despite the cascade of bad news, the Clinton camp's predictable reaction to such revelations is to hunker down and attack the messengers.

As all this swirled, the woman at the center of the meltdown remained, for all practical purposes, in hiding. She waited until Wednesday night to react with a single tweet: "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."

But the question is not whether the State Department will release what the Clinton political team turned over. It is why the team put State in this impossible position in the first place. It could take months for the department to comb through the 55,000 pages of emails that Hillary chose to transmit.

According to sources who talked to Bloomberg Politics, Clinton and her team have now decided to duck and cover until she formally announces her candidacy, probably in April. They will apparently rely on the insulting belief that the public is too dumb to remember.

While the official Hillary camp hid out, surrogates stepped up. One of her few defenders was David Brock, the shape-shifter who morphed from a right-wing hitman in the early 90s into a left-leaning apologist for the Clintons as founder of Media Matters.

Advertisement

Taking a page from Hillary's playbook, Brock appeared on MSNBC to blame the scandal on an anti-Clinton media.

I suppose he would have us believe that the Washington Post is biased against Clinton. That must be why the Post was first to report that at various times, the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions of dollars from foreign governments, including Hamas-supporting Qatar and Saudi Arabia, an ostensible ally with strong links to radical Islam.

Is it Republican paranoia to worry that such countries might use the Clinton Foundation as a backdoor to seek favors from a future President Clinton?

But the fallout to the email bombshell should once and for all put the lie to the "right-wing conspiracy" theory. The whole liberal cast of MSNBC, from Mika Brzezinksi on "Morning Joe" to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, have sounded aghast all week that Hillary is again behaving as if she is above the rules that apply to ordinary humans.

I am not a Hillary hater. In fact, I would be overjoyed in 2016 to see the first face in the Oval Office that looks like the other half of the American population. And I believe Hillary Clinton has the intellect and the experience to be a good President.

She has earned the respect of leaders all over the world. As a tireless diplomat, she did her best to restore trust in the United States while George W. Bush's unnecessary war and futile occupation of Iraq wound down.

But even those of us who might support her candidacy have to face a painful question: In at least one serious way, is her character flawed?

Starting with her knowledge of Bill Clinton's stream of girlfriends from well before they married, Hillary has cultivated the habit of not knowing what she doesn't want to know — of literally compartmentalizing facts.

One can trace the whole chain of events — starting from her dismissal of the New York Times Whitewater queries, which led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, which then led to the investigations of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, and finally to Bill Clinton's impeachment — not only to Republican efforts to bring down the Clintons, but to Hillary's first and deepest instinct: to stonewall.

Her frustrated scandal manager during the Whitewater investigations, attorney Jane Sherburne, told me back then that the First Lady's attitude toward questions about her public role was, "What business is it of theirs?"

Ambitious enough? (Timothy D. Easley/AP)

Many sources who have worked inside Hillary's bubble have told me how formidable and intimidating she can be. "When she says 'Fix it!' or 'If there's a problem, fire 'em!'" she doesn't appreciate how she can make people jump," Sherburne told me. "Hillary lacks self-awareness of this trait and how it affects people."

These perpetual and deep-seated problems make it all the more necessary that a prominent Democrat keep up the political pressure on Hillary — at least to discipline her worst instincts, if not to serve as an understudy in the event her candidacy implodes.

Advertisement

I don't mean Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley. They're decent enough politicians but without the necessary chops. Joe Biden would be more formidable, but he's too closely yoked to the Obama years.

The only one who has the political argument and personal fire to make a strong stand is Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The liberal Democratic heroine was asked last week by the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC's "Politics Nation" whether Clinton would be a "progressive warrior." Warren's reply was cool as the snow blanketing her home state.

"You know, I think that's what we gotta see," Warren responded. "I want to hear what she wants to run on and what she says she wants to do. That's what campaigns are supposed to be about."

Bill Clinton, I am told by a Warren insider, is the one who sees Warren as a threat — a natural politician who excites the base in ways that Hillary cannot seem to do.

Ex-Sen. Clinton herself was nervous enough to try inviting the popular freshman Sen. Warren for a cozy chat at the Clintons' Washington home last December. She tried to persuade the fiery populist to abandon her own national platform as a media darling who fights for working families. Wouldn't she prefer to take the veil as one of Clinton's 200-plus friendly insiders?

Not on her life.

"Elizabeth is a rock-thrower," says a close advisor, who insists on being nameless as do all on Warren's team. The senator even keeps a bowl of rocks on her desk. When an advisor offered to send more rocks from a New Year's gathering of mostly liberal political junkies, Warren responded, "Don't bother, I have plenty."

Warren, people tell me, has little regard for Hillary. In 1998, the then-Harvard law professor met with the former First Lady and gained her agreement to help fight for working families against "that awful (bankruptcy) bill," as Clinton called it.

But Bill Clinton was not ready to pick a fight with the banks. As a presidential candidate-in-waiting, Hillary has shown her conflicted stance, as one who talks tough on redressing the erosion of middle-class wages while she gladly accepts huge speaking fees to sweet-talk Wall Street titans.

Warren is nothing if not impassioned. As she admits in her memoir, "A Fighting Chance," she wasn't born with a lot of talents. She wasn't especially pretty, didn't have the highest grades, didn't play a sport or sing. Her one talent was she could fight: "not with my fists, but with my words."

In her memoir she writes of the day she grew up, at age 12, when her daddy had a heart attack. Soon after, the family lost their station wagon. Then they lost their house.

Her father's job selling carpets for Montgomery Ward was taken from him, and when little Elizabeth asked her mother why, she was told his company robbed him of something he had worked for all his life. But why? The child wanted to know.

The answer came: "They think he's going to die."

Her mother walked to Sears Roebuck to interview for her first job. She was 50.

Protecting working families who are struggling to discharge debts, find relief from student loans and collect child support from debt-buried spouses is personal with Warren.

And it would create a perfect contrast with Clinton who, when push comes to shove, seems to side with the powerful, or reflexively defend her own interests.

So why not stage an unconventional, rogue primary campaign that's suited to her message and character?

According to a Warren insider who also worked with the Clinton White House, "Elizabeth couldn't be happier with her role — she loves pushing Hillary on economic issues. She'll get all of Hillary's responses on the record and play this out to the last possible moment, until Hillary decides."

Warren is wildly ambitious, this source says, not for her personal success, but to change the direction of the country. This just might be her moment.

Sheehy is author of "Daring: My Passages," a memoir, and the biography "Hillary's Choice."